I’m having a crisis with my blog. I clearly need a redesign and some overall polish, but I’m unsure of what I really want to do with it beyond that. I’d like to rearrange some things so that it’d be a minor source of income, but I guess I’m not sure what I really want to talk about here. I’m torn between talking about whatever strikes my fancy, like I do now, or focusing more on a particular area or interest, like technology entrepreneurship or real estate investing. If you’ve been a reader for awhile and there’s anything in particular that you’ve enjoyed reading on here, please post a comment and let me know what you want to hear more/less of. Thanks!

When I read articles that discuss the vastness of the cosmos and the trillions upon trillions of stars that inhabit our universe, and the likelihood that there are perhaps billions of inhabited planets out there teeming with life, the emotion I feel most is not awe, but a deep sadness for all that we’ll never know or understand about the universe. Many of these galaxies are tens of billions of light years away, so unless there’s some pretty impressive loopholes in the laws of physics as we understand them today, we as a species will never know what lies beyond the tiniest fraction of our little corner of the universe.

And that’s depressing.

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my American dream

“American Dream” by Switchfoot

Note: This is a repost of a blog post on the MightyBrand blog…thought it might be useful to some folks over here.

Short version: we’re launching a new web application called MightyReach that lets you create a customized dashboard of all your web and social media stats. Check it out and sign up to be notified when it launches!

Longer explanation:

We’ve had a blast working on MightyBrand over the last few months and we’ve got a new set of features that we’re going to be launching soon that we wanted to share. The idea is that we’ll be allowing you to create a customized dashboard where you can view all your web analytics and social media stats in one place. You can track visitors to your website, subscribers to your RSS feeds, followers on Twitter, views of your videos, etc. The best part is that we’re integrating with all the 3rd-party services that you already use, so you don’t need to change anything to use our solution.

While we were working on this, we realized that there’s a lot of people out there who might want this stats dashboard in a standalone app, so we decided to launch it as a new web application. It’s still in progress, but if you head over to MightyReach.com, you can get a feel for what we’re working on and sign up to be notified when we start opening up the beta program. And as always, we’d love to hear what you think about the idea and how we can make it better.

It’s recently come to my attention that in the excitement of the last five months, I’ve neglected to really talk about MightyBrand, my startup, and what’s going on with it. So here’s a brief overview for those of you that are curious.

In mid-2006, Ben Lew, Ben Rasmusen, and myself all started working on a social network aggregator called BlueSwarm. The idea was to allow you to easily see what your friends were doing across all the different social networks. We launched it in July 2007 and got some decent feedback, but we weren’t sure how we were going to monetize it, so we started thinking about different ways to use the technology.

In April of 2008, we got the idea to build a social media monitoring service for brands. We started coding in May of 2008, using a lot of the existing code from BlueSwarm. We kept the name BlueSwarm and launched our prototype in September 2008. For the next few months, we gathered feedback from our alpha users, tweaked our business model, built out a slew of new features, and renamed the company to MightyBrand.

We launched as MightyBrand on Jan. 22nd, 2009. Since then, we’ve worked on MightyBrand full-time, helping companies and individuals learn how to build strong brands online using social media. If you’d like to know more, check out the MightyBrand blog and follow us on Twitter.

The last five months have been challenging and exhilarating and I’m gathering enough blog post material to get me through the next ten years. I’ll post some of my lessons learned later, but in the meantime, if you have any questions, please post them in the comments…I’d love to hear from you!